Criminal
Justice

The
Language LinePolice
Subscribe
But Do They Use It?

Just
dial 1-800-528-5888. Ask for the language you want, and a live
translator comes on the line to serve you in any one of seventy
seven languages. You can conference call, use two phones on the
same line, or you can simply pass the phone back and forth to the
person with whom you wish to converse.

It's simple! It's
Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And It's *@^&% expensive!
If you use The Language Line as an unsubscribed individual
it costs between $4.15 a minute (for Spanish translations) and $7.25
a minute (for less common languages such as Urdu, a principle language
of Pakistan). Unfortunately, this is clearly not a service you can
use on a daily basis to chat with your neighbor.

But for community emergency
services there is a subscription rate that brings the service within
a feasible range. Using The Language Line translation at the
subscription rate costs $2.20 a minute.

The major police departments
of Sonoma County subscribe to The Language Line. But do they
use it?

At
many crime scenes, there are usually friends, family members, or
neighbors nearby who can help translate to police for monolingual
crime victims. Often a youngster steps in and does a fine job of
translating, just as they are accustomed to translating to landlords,
merchants, and many other daily communication needs of monolingual
parents and neighbors. For better or worse, police have relied heavily
on this language survival for as long as America has had immigrants.

With rape and domestic
violence, however, another whole set of considerations comes into
play that makes this traditional reliance on translations by people
at the scene highly detrimental to the woman and her case.

Domestic violence and
rape victims are typically extremely protective about keeping the
raw details of these crimes from their children. And for many good
reasons, they are also very reluctant to reveal details to neighbors.
And it's accurate, complete details from the victim that are exactly
what police need to make these cases stick.

Quoted statements made
by these victims at the scene, much more so than in other crimes,
are always key evidence at prosecution time.

In
addition, statements made at the scene carry heightened credibility
compared to statements made further down the line. Further, any
attempts to make later corrections are often used by the defense
to undermine the victim's credibility. Yet despite the heightened
importance of obtaining precise victim statements at the scene,
few police make the call to The Language Line. As a result, domestic violence
and rape victim statements from non-English speaking victims at
the scene are often inaccurate and almost always harmfully understated.

Police should be encouraged
to use the The Language Line for all rape and domestic violence victim statements
when the officer doesn't speak the victim's language.

What about the $45 to
$70 cost for a 20 to 30 minute call to get an accurate, unguarded
statement from a victim?

If you think about it,
this cost is minimal compared to the cost of returning over and
over again to the same unresolved crime scene. It's minimal compared
to the cost of an unchecked rapist escalating his crimes from one
women to the next. And minimal compared to the lifetime of costs
of children who are exposed to violence in the home.

In fact, even $100 dollars
to do it right the first time is very low compared to most other
standard investigative tools police police use to solve other crimes,
such as the expensive forensic tests routinely used to make a drug
case.